RAS Collections Evening 2026
On Thursday 7 May, the Society will host its annual Collections Evening. This year, we are delighted to host three talks exploring manuscript and art collections from Malaysia, India, and Japan.
Dr Farouk Yahya will speak about ‘The Maxwell Collection and Local Private Libraries in the Malay Peninsula during the 19th Century’. The collection of Malay manuscripts and printed books of Sir William Maxwell (1846-1897), now held at the Society, is remarkable in terms of the quantity and variety of the material, many of which were acquired from local sources. This brief talk will explore some of the private libraries in the Malay peninsula that formed the basis of Maxwell’s collection, providing a valuable insight into the acquisition and circulation of books in the region during the nineteenth century.
Many of the manuscripts in the Maxwell Collection have been digitized and are available to consult online via our Digital Library.
Niyu Lin will give a talk titled ‘Listening to the Creek Beneath: The Palimpsest of the Faulds Album.’ This presentation will explore the Society’s Faulds Album (RAS 079), an Edo-period concertina album that appears to contain fragments of Buddhist imagery. It focuses on the often-overlooked underlying layers of painting and calligraphy beneath the Buddhist drawings attributed to the Kanda Sōtei atelier, revealing the album as a palimpsest that records a shift from individual, literati practice to collective, institutional workshop production.
We will also welcome Professor Almut Hintze, Professor Peter Cornwell, and Dr Myriadne Wang, who will address different aspects of a major project which saw the digitisation and online display of 55 notebooks from the Society’s Edward William West archive. These largely comprise copies of Zoroastrian texts made in north-west India in the later nineteenth century. They were photographed by postdoctoral students working as part of the Multimedia Yasna project (MUYA) and later made available online via an online collections platform.
You can read more about the genesis of this project, and about the West Collection, in this blog post.
The Collections Evening series was inaugurated as a regular showcase to highlight the ways in which the Society’s collections are being used to promote research and public engagement. They also provide an opportunity to see how items are being catalogued and conserved, making them available to current audiences as well as ensuring they are available to inspire future generations.
We hope you will be able to join us for this event, which will be held both in-person and online via Zoom. If you would like to join online, please email Matty Bradley at mb@royalasiaticsociety.org.
The Society’s events continue to come thick and fast. Next week, at 6.30pm on Tuesday 3 February, Halle O’Neal will speak about ‘The Weight of Ephemeral Things: Paper, Memory, and Women Makers in Medieval Japan’. This event is part of the Japan Series; please note it is hosted at The Courtauld, Vernon Square, not at the Society itself.
Journal
The latest issue of Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (vol. 35, no. 4, October 2025) is now available online.
Fellows of the Society enjoy free online access to the current issue, along with the complete archive of the Journal and its predecessor, the Transactions, dating back to 1827. To access, simply visit our Journal page, click Read the Journal, and log in with your RAS account. For Fellows who prefer printed copies, discounted subscriptions are available – contact us at info@royalasiaticsociety.org for details.
Edward Weech